Media Spectacle
By Douglas Kellner
Preface and Acknowledgements
1. Media Culture and the Triumph of the Spectacle
Guy
Debord and the Society of the Spectacle
The
Infotainment Society and Technocapitalism
From
Media Culture to Media Spectacle
Signs
of the Times
Cultural
Studies as Diagnostic Critique
2. Commodity Spectacle: McDonald's as Global Culture
McDonald’s
and McDonaldization
Theorizing
McDonald’s: A Multiperspectivist Approach
McDonald's
Between the Global and the Local
McDonald’s
Between the Modern and the Postmodern
Criticizing/Resisting
McDonaldization
The
Case Against McDonald's
Evaluating
McDonaldization
The
Personal and the Political
3. The Sports Spectacle, Michael Jordan, and Nike
The
Sports Spectacle
The
Spectacle of Michael Jordan
Jordan
and the Sports/Race Spectacle
Jordan,
Nike, and the Commodity Spectacle
Third Coming, Sex Scandal, and
Contradictions of the Spectacle
4. Megaspectacle: The O.J. Simpson Murder Trial
Murder
and Media Spectacle in Brentwood
Spectacle Culture and the
Social Construction of Reality
The
Verdict and the Aftermath
The Simpson Spectacle, Identity Politics, and Postmodernization
The Simpson Effect:
Contradictions of a Megaspectacle
5. TV Spectacle: Aliens, Conspiracy and Biotechnology in
The X-Files
Series
Television as Social Critique: "Trust No One"
The Postmodern Sublime, or "Is the
Truth Out There"?
Postmodern
Deconstruction: "I Want to Believe" but...
Nothing Important Happened TodayŠ Except that Everything Changed
Representing
the Unrepresentable
6. Spectacle Politics: Presidential Narratives from JFK
to Bush II
JFK,
the Movie
LBJ
and Nixon: Bad Movies
Ford and Carter: Indifferent Presidencies
and Poor Spectacle
Ronald
Reagan, the Acting President
Bush
I: Mixed Spectacle, Failed Presidency
The Clinton Spectacle: Sex, Scandal,
Impeachment, and Survival
Bush
II, Grand Theft 2000, and Terror War
Conclusion: Democratic Politics and
Spectacle Culture in the New Millennium
References
As
the human adventure enters a new millennium, media culture continues to be a
central organizing force in the economy, politics, culture, and everyday life.
Media culture drives the economy, generating ebbing and flowing corporate
profits while disseminating the advertising and images of high-consumption
life-styles that help reproduce the consumer society. Media culture also
provides models for everyday life that replicate high consumption ideals and
personalities and sell consumers on commodity pleasures and solutions to their
problems, new technologies, and novel forms of identity. As technocapitalism
moves into a dazzling and seductive information/entertainment society, mergers
between the media giants are proliferating, competition is intensifying, and
the media generate spectacles to attract audiences to the programs and
advertisements that fuel the mighty money machines. Yet the Terror Spectacle of
September 11 and its aftermath unleashed war and destruction, creating
multiplying crises in the global economy and growing insecurity in everyday
life.
In the past decades, spectacle culture has significantly evolved. Every form of culture and more and more spheres of social life are permeated by the logic of the spectacle. Movies are bigger and more spectacular than ever, with high-tech special effects expanding the range of cinematic spectacle. Television channels proliferate endlessly with all-day movies, news, political talk, sports, specialty niches, re-runs of the history of television, and whatever else can gain an audience. The rock spectacle reverberates through radio, television, CDs and DVDs, computer networks, and extravagant concerts. Media culture provides fashion and style models for emulation and promotes a celebrity culture that provides deities and role models.
Media
culture excels in creating megaspectacles of sports events, world
conflicts, entertainment, "breaking news" and media events, such as
the O.J. Simpson trial, the death of Princess Diana, or the sex, murder, and
related scandals of the moment. Megaspectacle comes as well to dominate party
politics, as their heavily dramatized presentations implode into the political
battles of the day, such as the Clinton sex scandals and impeachment, the 36
Day Battle for the White House after Election 2000, and the September 11
terrorist attacks and subsequent Terror War. These dramatic media passion plays
define the politics and culture of the time, and attract mass audiences to
their programming, hour after hour, and day after day.[1]
The
Internet in turn has generated a seductive cyberspace, producing novel forms of
information, entertainment, and social interaction, while promoting a dot.com
frenzied boom and bust that fuelled and then deflated the "new
economy," producing a turbulent new form of creative destruction in the
vicissitudes of global capitalism. Ever bigger and more encompassing corporate
mergers suggest emergent synergies between the Internet and media culture, and
thus the information and entertainment industries. These interactions of
technology and capital are producing fecund forms of technocapitalism
and a technoculture which promise that the new millennium will be full
of novelties, innovation, hype, and instability.
September
11 and the subsequent Terror War, however, intensified uncertainty and
unpredictability, disclosed a new vulnerability of the most powerful Western
societies, and showed how a set of well-orchestrated terrorist attacks could
wreak havoc with the global economy and polity. These catastrophic events and
their attendant instability and capriciousness assure a profitable futures
market for investments in chaos and complexity theory, as well as arms and
security industries. Yet it also appears that the information society is
being put on hold in the interests of eradicating evil (i.e. terrorism) from
the world. The new forms of war and politics suggest that perhaps there may
even be a come-back for postmodern theory,[2]
that articulates breaks and ruptures in history and far-reaching novelties in
the economy, politics, society, culture and everyday life. There may also be a
return to dialectical theory, as the interconnections between globalization,
technological revolution, media spectacle, Terror War, and the domains of
cyberspace and the Internet become central to every sphere of existence from
the dramas and banalities of everyday life to the survival of the human species
and life on earth.
In
the new millennium, media culture is more important than ever in serving as a
force of socialization, providing models of masculinity and femininity,
socially approved and disapproved behavior, style and fashion, and appropriate
role models (Kellner 1995). The celebrities of media culture are the icons of
the present age, the deities of an entertainment society in which money, looks,
celebrity, and success are the ideals and goals of the dreaming billions who
inhabit Planet Earth. As the human species prepares to embark on voyages into
outer space, to explore inner space with the miracles of nanotechnology, and to
remake the human species with biotechnology, possibilities emerge that the
media, consumer, medical, and other technologies of the present age will propel
the human species into a posthuman adventure that may even exhibit the
spectacle of the end of humanity in an age of spiritualized and transformative
machines.[3]
Whatever
the vicissitudes and dynamics of the future, today, media culture continues to
arbitrate social and political issues, deciding what is real, important, and
vital. Especially spectacular events, such as the 1991 Gulf war, the 2000
Battle for the White House, or the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and their
aftermath, bring TV day to a halt, with cable news channels suspending regular
programming to cover the events of the minute. Sometimes megaspectacles like
September 11 and Terror War take over TV day in its entirety and dominate news,
information, advertising, and entertainment for months on end. At the same time
that corporate control and relentless mergers reduce the number of news sources
and put them under more rigid corporate control, Internet sites multiply
information and disinformation. The ‘net also provides an interactive sphere
where netizens can discover novel opinions and facts and themselves participate
in the great dialogue of the contemporary moment (whatever it may be).
In
this book, I undertake studies of key media spectacles of the present age in
order to illuminate transformations and defining features of the contemporary
economy, polity, society, and culture in the new millennium. Chapter 1 provides
an overview of defining media spectacles in every domain of contemporary life
and stakes out the critical social theory and cultural studies that I will use
throughout the book. In Chapter 2, I show how analysis of McDonald's fast-food
chain provides insights into the dynamics of globalization, the dialectic of
the global and the local, and the ways that U.S. cultural products are
appropriated and used throughout the world to provide new forms of global and
hybridized culture. Likewise, the study of Michael Jordan and Nike in Chapter 3
helps illuminate global media culture and NBA basketball and how U.S. sports
have become a global popular in the 1990s, while sport deities like Jordan
developed into worldwide celebrities. The McDonald's study helps elucidate
features of contemporary consumer culture, while the Jordan and Nike reading
engages the interconnection of sports, commercialization, and celebrity culture
in the present era, wherein sports, business, and spectacle culture merge into
one another.
The
megaspectacle of the O.J. Simpson trial in the mid-1990s provides a case to
study in Chapter 4 of the intersections of gender, race, and class in
contemporary U.S. society and the ways that identity politics are fragmenting
society into competing groups from which individual gain their primary
identity. The Simpson saga, far from being merely a sordid murder trial, also
shows how the logic of the spectacle is permeating the legal system and crime
and colonizing everyday life by permeating television day, generating endless
breaking news, talk shows, Internet sites, and later TV documentaries and
docudramas.
Chapter
5 engages the popular TV-series and film-franchise The X-Files, running
on TV from 1992 into 2002, which provides an instructive example of the
television spectacle that combines high-tech aesthetic effects with convoluted
allegories of the horrors of contemporary life. Producing a spectacle of
government conspiracy, alien invasion, and biotechnological mutations of the
human, X-Files puts on display a vast panorama of contemporary fears,
fantasies, and conflicts. It allows a diagnostic critique of fears of
government conspiracies, aliens and terrorists, medical invasions of the mind
and body, and mutations of the human in an era of technoculture and
technoscience.
Politics
too has become a megaspectacle over the past decade as the Persian Gulf TV War
dramatized U.S. military power and weapons system, attempted to save a failing
Bush presidency (the first one), and tried to insert the U.S. as the principal
police-force in the New World Order (Kellner 1992). A more television and media
savvy younger presidential candidate, Bill Clinton, used media spectacle to
defeat the aging and disengaged George Bush in 1992. But Clinton then faced the
wrath of a resolute Republican opposition that used all the media of
contemporary culture to create a spectacle of scandal to attempt to destroy his
presidency. Curiously, and unpredictably, the Republican spectacle of
moralistic vengeance backfired and Clinton survived (barely) the spectacle of
impeachment.
After a lackluster
election in 2000 between Son of Bush and Clinton's Vice-President Al Gore, the
world was treated to the megaspectacle of a Battle for the White House in which
an election was stolen by the Republicans, generating fertile conditions for
future political wars and spectacle (Kellner, 2001. In an era of spectacle
politics, reading political spectacles like the Clinton sex scandals and
impeachment trials and the Battle for the White House and Theft of an election
in November-December 2000 can illustrate the broad patterns and trajectories of
contemporary politics, culture, and society. Indeed, I will argue that these
components of recent U.S. political spectacle are interrelated and can best be
read in the context of seeing how the cultural wars and presidential politics
from the 1960s to the present played out on the stage of political spectacle.
In Chapter 6, I provide a study of Presidential Politics, the Movie to
discuss vicissitudes of media and politics from the 1960s to the present.
Two major spectacles delayed the publication of this book. I was undertaking to conclude my studies for book publication in November 11 when I got caught up in the Battle for the White House in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Election night provided one of the great media spectacles of all-time as the presidential election went from what appeared as a win for Al Gore, to an announced win for George W. Bush to an eventual deadlock and the subsequent Florida Recount Wars, itself a grand political spectacle. I initially wrote up an account of election night that I felt would provide an excellent opening for my studies of media spectacle. The study of the Battle for the White House became what I envisaged as a chapter in this book, and then eventually became a book in itself, Grand Theft 2000 (Kellner 2001), when I concluded that the media spectacle of the 2000 election and its aftermath was one of the great political battles and crimes of U.S. history.
Having concluded Grand Theft 2000 in the Fall of
2001, I returned to finish Media Spectacle, but the September 11
terrorist bombings and subsequent Terror War generated another major media
spectacle which over the next months took over my research energies. Engaging
the momentous spectacle as it unfolded, I produced another book length
manuscript which I am now preparing for publication under the provisional title
of September 11, Terror War, and the New Barbarism (Kellner,
forthcoming). Hence, I now have a media spectacle trilogy that I present as my
gift to understanding society, culture, and politics in the Third Millennium.
As the present text indicates, I did manage to complete
my studies of Media Spectacle in a highly turbulent political and
cultural situation. In some ways, postponement of publication of Media
Spectacle while I worked on the major unfolding political spectacles of the
era was fortuitous. As Chapter 1 reveals, the opening years of the new
millennium were rich in spectacle, making clear that the construction of media
spectacle in every realm of culture was one of the defining characteristics of contemporary
culture and society. Likewise, the problematics of the specific studies that I
was carrying out were enriched and complexified in the past couple of years.
While up until 2000, McDonald’s appeared as an almost uncontested example of
the success of capitalist globalization, the anti-globalization movement began
making McDonald’s the target of major demonstrations. McDonald’s profits began
to fall for the first time in the opening years of the new millennium and
McDonald’s itself emerged as an increasingly contradictory and contested site
in the present age (see Chapter 2).
The
Michael Jordan sports spectacle that I have been following for some years took
on added dimensions and pathos in 2001-2002 as Jordan attempted a comeback and
as his failing marriage with his wife Juanita added a dimension of tabloid sex
scandal to the Jordan saga. The reaggravation of Jordan’s knee-injuries in
March 2002 and his dropping out of play for the season just before the NBA
playoffs provided a spectacle of finitude, mortality, and the limitations of
the aging body, just as the younger Jordan had presented a spectacle of godlike
transcendence and sport idol deity. Hence, the Michael Jordan spectacle also
emerged as more complex and contradictory as the millennium unfolds (see
Chapter 3).
The O.J. Simpson saga continued to play out in the New Millennium as well, internally as its celebrity scandal dimension intensified with new clashes between Simpson and the law. Another round of celebrity sex scandal in his personal life also emerged, as Simpson carried out a very public and tumultuous relation with a lookalike of his murdered wife Nicole. It was also becoming clearer that the Simpson spectacle was a bellweather event in the transition to a time of tabloid journalism in which during an age of new media, celebrity scandals and the megaspectacle of the day dominated the news cycle (Chapter 4).
The
conspiracy theories concerning the Simpson celebrity murder scandal continued
to proliferate and pointed to the growing role of machination and manipulations
in contemporary U.S. society and culture. Although the popular TV-series The
X-Files declined in popularity in its past two seasons, culminating in an
announcement in January 2002 that the series would be cancelled at the end of
its ninth season, the narrative trajectories of the last two seasons make it
clear that the alien and conspiracy motif intersects in a major way with fears
over cloning, the genetic engineering of human beings, and the creation of a
new species that could surpass and eliminate human beings, thus bringing the
adventures of the human to a close. I am thus able to provide an overview of
the entire TV-series and its relevance during an age of cloning and genetic
engineering (Chapter 5).
Further, as I note above, adding Election 2000, the
Battle for the White in the Florida Recount Wars, and the events of September
11 in my studies of contemporary politics (found in Chapter 6 of this text)
provided an enrichment of our understanding of the role of media spectacle in
contemporary politics. A new political sex scandal emerged in 2002 to follow
the Clinton sex scandals when Chandra Levy, an intern of California Congressman
Bill Condit, was found to be missing and the tabloids had a field day
uncovering the kinky details of their mutual sex lives and perhaps fateful
overlapping. The arrest of film and TV actor Robert Blake for the murder of his
wife in April 2002 and saturation coverage of the event shows that the
celebrity murder scandal evident in the O.J. Simpson megaspectacle continues to
be of major import and fascination in the present age.
Thus, the theories and models of media spectacle
developed in the present book should be of use for years to come. Since I make
extensive use of Internet research sources I should make some comments about
use and citation of this material. As is well known, Internet sources often
disappear as sites shut down, take material off, or change location.
Google.com, Alexa.com, and some other search engines have taken to copying and
caching files in order to preserve Internet material that often disappears from
its original location. Thus, while I cite the Internet url of actual material
used in my text, the specific Internet source cited may disappear. Further, I
would recommend that readers wishing to inspect my sources llok for them in the
:Wayback Machine at www.archive.org/index.html, or type in key words from the
material cited to google.com or other search engines in order to find the
original sources that I cited or other related interesting material. The
Internet is a cornucopia of research material, although it must of course be
used with caution.
In
some cases, the studies presented here appear in print for the first time and I
have completely recast previously published texts to fit into the framework of
this book and have updated earlier versions. At the beginning of each chapter,
I cite previous publication sources and thank individuals who contributed to
each study. For the entire book, I would like to thank Rhonda Hammer who read,
discussed, and was often engaged in the research, as when we spent a year or
more watching the O.J. Simpson spectacle go through surprising twists and
turns. I would also like to give special thanks to Richard Kahn who carefully
edited every chapter and provided ideas and research material that I utilized
in specific studies. I would also like to thank Richard for expertly
constructing and administering my UCLA Web-site
(http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner. html), and designing and
helping administer a new blogLeft project begun in April 2002 as I brought
these studies to a close.
Finally, thanks to Mari Shulaw for commissioning the
book, putting up with the constant delays signaled above, and giving me solid
editorial advice and support throughout this process. For copy-editing support,
I would like to thank
And, now, on with the showŠ
Douglas Kellner, Los Angeles, April 2002
[1]. I suppose that this is the place to indicate the U.S.-centric nature of my subject-position and that I am interpreting the world from the lenses of decades at the University of Texas in Austin and then from the vistas of the University of California at Los Angeles. As I now write, I am looking out the window from West Hollywood into downtown L.A. and the Hollywood hills, in what is perhaps the epicenter of the contemporary media spectacle of our times and during an era of globalization more than a merely local phenomenon. Of course, things look different from variegated class, gender, race, and regional positions. And yet while the focus of my studies is on salient phenomena of U.S. culture and their planetary proliferations, in a globalized world, technologies, commodities, cultures, ideas, and experiences rapidly circulate throughout the planet. Thus, for those living outside the U.S., I might recall what Marx said to all in regard to his analysis of capitalism in England: "De te fabula narratur!" ("The tale is told of you").
[2]
For my various takes on postmodern theory and culture, see Best and Kellner
1991, 1997, and 2001, and Kellner 1995. In the latter text, Media Culture
I maintain that the contemporary era is an interim period between the modern
and the postmodern era. As I try to show in this text, one of the features of
postmodernity is an increasingly important role of media spectacle in the
economy, polity, culture, and everyday life.
[3] For debates over the
vicissitudes of the human in the contemporary era and possible transition to
the posthuman, see Best and Kellner 2001.